On Jan. 21, 2010, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 60-year-old federal ban on corporate spending in elections in a landmark case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC). This decision has enabled corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections in the years since. It has also led to the prolific use of nonprofit corporations as a vehicle for wealthy donors to spend huge sums influencing elections while concealing their identities as the source of such spending.
Back to topVoters have a right to know which wealthy special interests are spending big money to influence our vote and our government to rig the political system in their favor.
But years of living under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), commonly known as Citizens United, has made it easier than ever for...
In 2010, the Supreme Court, by a slim, 5-4 vote, rejected a federal law prohibiting corporate spending in elections. In the same decision, however, eight of the Court’s nine justices voted to leave in place rules that required groups to disclose their spending on election ads, which were part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). The BCRA is also commonly known as McCain-Feingold.
In finding the prohibition on corporate spending unconstitutional, the majority overturned part of the Supreme Court’s previous decision in McConnell v. FEC (2003), and the full decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), both of which found restrictions on corporate spending to be constitutional.
The Supreme Court in McConnell also upheld parts of BCRA that extended federal transparency requirements to a broader category of election-related ads. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court recognized the importance and constitutionality of those disclosure requirements, explaining that they enable voters to make informed electoral decisions.
Although the Citizens United case began as a narrow challenge to federal laws requiring disclosure and prohibiting corporate election spending in the limited context of a movie that Citizens United had produced, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of expanding the scope of the case so that it could revisit the Court’s own prior decisions upholding those laws.
The Court’s decision to reverse course and strike down the corporate contribution ban has allowed record-breaking amounts of money to flow into elections.
Notably, the Supreme Court insisted that the unlimited corporate election spending allowed in Citizens United would be publicly disclosed and not coordinated with the candidates the money was spent to support.
In practice, much of the big election spending since the decision has been “dark money,” which is increasingly spent in coordination between candidates and the supposedly “independent” groups supporting them.
Voters have a legal right to know who is spending money to influence elections and Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has been at the forefront of defending that right in court.
Case History:
This case began when a corporation, Citizens United, challenged corporate election spending restrictions and transparency requirements for its film about then-presential candidate Hillary Clinton, Hillary: The Movie, and ads promoting the film. In 2008, a lower court concluded that the film essentially functioned as a long campaign ad and was properly subject to those laws.
Citizens United appealed that decision to the Supreme Court seeking a ruling that the film could not constitutionally be regulated by the challenged campaign finance laws. Instead of answering that narrow question regarding the application of the laws to Hillary: The Movie, the Supreme Court decided to wholly reconsider its previous rulings upholding the ban on corporate election spending and ultimately reversed itself, overturning them. This fundamentally altered how money could be spent in elections and opened the door for corporations to spend big money to influence elections, and to be used as a tool for wealthy donors to conceal their identities as the sources of massive election spending.
CLC was involved from the onset of this case, filing “friend-of-the-court” briefs to defend rules requiring groups to disclose election spending and the prior Austin and McConnell decisions.
